The Learning Registry: Social networking for open educational resources?

This presentation will reflect on Cetis’ involvement with the Learning Registry and JISC’s Learning Registry Node Experiment at Mimas (The JLeRN Experiment), and their application to UKOER
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This presentation will reflect on Cetis’ involvement with the Learning Registry and JISC’s Learning Registry Node Experiment at Mimas (The JLeRN Experiment), and their application to UKOER initiatives. Initially funded by the US Departments of Education and Defense, the Learning Registry (LR) is an open source network for storing and distributing metadata and curriculum activity and social usage data about learning resources across diverse educational systems.

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CETIS is…jisc.cetis.ac.uk The Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards. A national Innovation Support Centre providing advice to the UK F/HE sector on educational technology and standards. A partnership between the Universities of Bolton and Strathclyde, and Heriot Watt University. #OER13

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Mimas is… mimas.ac.uk An organisation of experts. A nationally designated data centre hosting a significant number of the UKs research information assets and building applications to help people make the most of this rich resource. Based at the University of Manchester. #OER13

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What’s the problem? It’s good to share educational resources!  You need to describe your resources so other people can find them and decide whether they want to use them.  That means you need metadata to describe the educational characteristics of your resources.  But learning resources come in all shapes and sizes.  Learning resources are used in all sorts of different contexts.  By all people with all sorts of learning requirements.  Describing learning resources is hard.  #OER13

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You can end up with a lot of metadata… • You can end up with a lot of metadata.Image attribution: PBCore is licensed under a CC-BY unported licence. #OER13

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What’s the result?  Metadata schemas and profiles proliferate.  It’s difficult to exchange data between different repositories using different schema and vocabularies.  Educational resources get stuck in silos where users can not find them. #OER13

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And another thing… Social media applications allow users to share and comment on resources. Formal metadata schema are not good at capturing user interactions. So usage data and context of use gets lost. #OER13

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The Learning Registry A distributed infrastructure for sharing descriptive and usage data about learning resources. Initiated in 2010. An open source community project. Funded by the US DoE and DoD. Partners include Lockheed Martin, NSDL, ADL, SRI International, NSF, Library of Congress, OER Commons, Jisc. #OER13

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An open approach An open project – anyone can participate. Open source – Apache 2.0. Open documents and standards – Creative Commons. Open data – all data about resources is open. But… The resources themselves may be proprietary or commercial. Not just about OER. #OER13

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What the Learning Registry is… A large scale network of nodes, no single point of control. Each node based on schema-free database CouchDB. Unlike relational databases, data does not need to conform to pre-set schema. Documents are stored as a collection of key-value pairs in JSON format. APIs allow nodes to exchange data with other nodes and external services. #OER13

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Metadata and ParadataThe Learning Registry is metadata agnostic.Metadata is stored in a schema-free database.Also designed to store paradata - dynamic usage data.Paradata is generated as resources are used, reused, adapted, contextualized, favourited, tweeted, and shared.Paradata complements metadata by providing an additional layer of contextual information.Metadata describes what a resource is, paradata records how it is being used. #OER13

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To go back to the plumbing... In order for plumbing to be useful, you need to build something on top of it…. ….otherwise you end up with a big mess. #OER13

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Plumbers neededThe Learning Registry needs developers to build useful services and applications on top of the network of nodes.The data processing overhead, instead of being handled by the database, is pushed up to the application layer.Develops are needed to create services to process the data to make it useful to educators.But…this approach is relatively new to the education domain. #OER13

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Why all the interest? The Learning Registry adopted an innovative approach to an old problem. Already tried mandating formal metadata schema and controlled vocabularies with questionable success. (UKLOMCore anyone?) Not proposing institutions adopted the LR as the approach to manage their learning resources. It’s an interesting step in a new direction. Fitted with CETIS and Jisc’s remit to explore innovative learning technology developments. #OER13

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Issues – sharing data at network scaleJLeRN did not attempt to share data between nodes.APIs for distributing data between nodes are less well tested than the APIs for interfacing with services external to the LR.Projects, e.g. SPAWS, ENGrich, proved stand alone nodes do have benefits.But LR functionality has not been tested at network scale. #OER13

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Issues – technology lock inNot clear if there are real benefits to using LR as opposed to vanilla schema-free databases such as Mongo and CouchDB.LR provides APIs, documentation and community support.May lock developers in to using CouchDB rather than other solutions. #OER13

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Issues – semantic technologies Why not use semantic technologies e.g. RDF triple stores? Triple stores have been innovative technology of choice for sharing data on a web-wide scale for a decade or more. But uptake in the education domain has been slow. Steep learning curve associated with such technologies. Learning Registry’s open approach to dealing with messy educational data seemed to fit the ethos of the teaching and learning sector better. #OER13

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Conclusions JLeRN Experiment was a technical success. Innovative projects and developers have demonstrated that useful tools and service can be built on top of LR nodes. Overall impact on UK F/HE sector negligible. Always intended to be a proof of concept development, not a supported service. #OER13

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Conclusions LR technical infrastructure is a genuinely innovative approach to the thorny problem of managing and sharing learning resource descriptions and contextual data. Technical approaches, esp. use of schema free databases, may have some impact on the education technology landscape in the longer term. #OER13

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Coda - inBloom US K-12 initiative. “Secure data management service that allows states and districts to bring together and manage student and school data and connect it to learning tools used in classrooms.” Funded by Gates Foundation & Carnegie Corporation. inBloom index is a dedicated LR node that will connect to the LR network. Will be interesting to see if the LR works at network scale. #OER13